‘I need your help. What do we look for?’
A minute later, after keying in all the passwords he could think of, Orville gave up.
‘It’s useless. There’s nothing. And if there was, he’s already erased it.’
‘That gives me an idea. Wait,’ said Albert, taking from his pocket a USB flash drive no bigger than a stick of chewing gum, and connecting it to the CPU of the computer so that it would interface with the hard drive. ‘The little program in this baby will let you retrieve information from erased sections on the hard drive. We can go from there.’
‘Terrific. Look for Netcatch.’
‘Right!’
With a little buzz, a list of fourteen files appeared in the program’s search window. Albert opened all of them at once.
‘They’re html files. Saved websites.’
‘Do you recognise anything?’
‘Yes, I saved them myself. They’re what I call server conversations. Terrorists never send each other e-mails when they’re planning an attack. Any idiot knows that e-mail can go through twenty or thirty servers before reaching its destination, so you never know who’s watching your communication. What they do is give everyone in the cell the same password to a free account and they write whatever they need to pass on as a draft e-mail message. It’s like you’re writing to yourself except that it’s a whole cell of terrorists communicating with each other. The e-mail is never sent. It never goes anywhere because each one of the terrorists is using the same account and-’
Orville stood paralysed in front of the screen, so stunned that for a moment he forgot to breathe. The unthinkable, what he had never imagined, suddenly became obvious before his very eyes.
‘This isn’t right,’ he said.
‘What is it, Orville?’
‘I… hack through thousands and thousands of accounts every week. When we copy files from a web server, we only keep the text. If we didn’t, the images would quickly fill up our hard drives. The result is ugly, but you can still read it.’
Orville pointed a bandaged finger at the computer screen, where a conversation between terrorists on the e-mail account Maktoob.com could be seen with coloured buttons and images that would not have been the case had this been one of the files he had hacked into and saved.
‘Somebody went into Maktoob.com from the browser in this computer, Albert. Even though they erased it after they finished, the images remained in the memory cache. And to get into Maktoob…’
Albert understood even before Orville could finish.
‘Whoever was here had to know the password.’
Orville agreed.
‘It’s Russell, Albert. Russell is Huqan.’
At that moment shots rang out, shattering the large window.
77
AL MUDAWWARA DESERT, JORDAN
Fowler looked carefully at his watch. Nine seconds ahead of the agreed time, the unexpected happened.
Albert was calling.
The priest had gone to the canyon entrance to make his call. There was a blind spot there that the soldier watching from the southern end of the cliff couldn’t see. The moment he turned on the phone, the call came. Fowler knew straight away that something was wrong.
‘Albert, what’s happened?’
On the other end of the line he heard a number of voices yelling. Fowler tried to understand what was going on.
‘Throw down the phone!’
‘Officer, I
‘I told you to drop the fucking phone.’
‘I’m going to lower my arm slowly and talk. If you see me do something suspicious, then shoot me.’
‘This is my last warning. Drop it!’
‘Anthony,’ Albert’s voice was steady and clear. He’d finally put the earpiece in. ‘Can you hear me?’
‘Yes, Albert.’
‘Russell is Huqan. Confirmed. Be careful-’
The connection was cut off. Fowler felt a wave of shock wash over his body. He turned around to run towards the camp, then everything went black.
78
Andrea and Harel stopped at the entrance to the mess tent when they saw David Pappas running towards them. Pappas was carrying a bloody T-shirt and he seemed to be disoriented.
‘Doctor, Doctor!’
‘What the hell’s going on, David?’ answered Harel. She had been in the same bad mood ever since the water incident had made proper coffee a thing of the past.
‘It’s the professor. He’s in bad shape.’
David had volunteered to stay with Forrester while Andrea and Doc went to breakfast. The only thing that had delayed the demolition of the wall to get to the Ark was Forrester’s condition, although Russell had wanted to go ahead with the job the previous night. David had refused to open the cavity until the professor had had a chance to recover and could join them. Andrea, whose opinion of Pappas had gone from bad to worse over the past few hours, suspected that he was simply waiting for Forrester to be completely out of the way.
‘OK.’ Doc sighed. ‘You go ahead, Andrea. It doesn’t make sense for both of us to miss breakfast.’ She began jogging back towards the infirmary.
The reporter took a quick peek inside the mess tent. Zayit and Peterke waved back at her. Andrea liked the mute cook and his assistant but the only people sitting at the tables at that moment were two of the soldiers, Alois Gottlieb and Louis Maloney, who were eating from their trays. Andrea was surprised
